


Party Lines

by PacificRimbaud



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 2000 US Presidential Election, Alternate Universe - America, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Muggle, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Enemies to Lovers, Enthusiastic Consent, F/M, Fluff, Heavy Drinking, Miscommunication, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:16:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21890344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: As the dust settles in the 2000 United States Presidential election, Ivy League student Hermione Granger goes to three different parties, in an effort to think about something- anything- other than the state of Florida.So does that argumentative trust fund prick, Draco Malfoy.A non-magical AU all about enemies who...aren't.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 122
Kudos: 1168
Collections: Strictly Dramione Christmas Fest 2019, reread so many times that its becoming unhealthy





	Party Lines

**Author's Note:**

> This work briefly touches on non-inflammatory political themes in vague terms, with a Presidential election as the backdrop for a lighthearted romance. Please gauge your ability to hang with mentions of 20 year-old politics.  
> Thanks for reading!

**Wednesday, November 8th, 2000**

_“We’re officially saying Florida is too close to call because of a recall...vote counters are being called back to work to count absentee ballots...so we take Florida away from George W. Bush, that means he is short of the 270 votes that he needs to win. If in fact it goes back into the George Bush column at the end of all this long, confusing tabulation, he’s the President Elect. If it goes to Al Gore, Al Gore still needs to win Wisconsin, or Oregon, to be the new President of the United States, so, this could not be closer.”_

_“Actually, Tom, all Al Gore needs is Florida. All George Bush needs, is Florida.”_

Hermione doesn’t realize that she’s been digging her fingernails into the heels of her palms for hours until she’s so tired that she finally stops.

She looks down at her hands through aching, predawn vision, the blue fuzz of the TV light burned into her retinas, and sees two lines of deep purple half moons in her skin, like wide, perverse smiles.

“You should go home,” says Cho. Cho’s eyes are red-rimmed and swollen, her skin looks puffy, and there’s a hank of hair coming free from her ponytail in the back. Looking at her, Hermione sees herself, sees everyone in the room: limp, deflated, exhausted.

“We should all go home,” says Cedric. He stands up, pulls a length of blue crepe paper streamer from the back of his navy blue Gore/Liebermann t-shirt, crumples it in his hand, and misses the throw to a trash can six feet away. “We all have classes in a few hours.”

Cedric is a graduate student, and profoundly capable. Everyone listens to him.

Hermione makes the short walk back to her apartment slowly,`in the dark, alone. She has no recollection of actually getting into her bed, but she wakes up there four hours later, still in her jeans.

She immediately flips on NBC, and watches the ongoing election coverage until she's nearly late for class.

**Friday, November 24th, 2000**

“ _Every. Ballot. Counts._ If not, why are we doing any of this? What's the point of calling what we do democracy if the second there’s a delay in the process, the moment we’re presented with a set of circumstances that should have been at least imaginable, we determine that grappling with the complexity and fallibility of our electoral systems is simply too time consuming? Explain the hurry to me."

Hermione knows she's talking too loud, beyond what’s required to be heard over the Basement Jaxx blaring out of the DJ’s party speakers, but she's on her fifth red Solo cup one third filled- half filled?- with shitty Merlot, and she has the right- has _every_ right- to be angry.

" _Explain_ ," she says again. Her eyes lose and regain focus on the other side of the room, and she frowns. "What’s _that_ asshole doing here?”

That asshole, the blonde with the skin so pale he nearly glows, the one who's in two of Hermione’s poli sci classes this semester even though he's a finance major, whose grandfather just retired from the U.S. Senate, and whose father could probably buy the other half of midtown Manhattan that he doesn’t already own if he really felt like it, is dancing in the middle of the living room with a brunette in a green dress, who seems to be trying to drape herself around his hips like a towel.

Ginny spins around to look, and tilts, thrown off balance by a belly full of Smirnoff and peppermint schnapps. Not for the first time since she met him, Hermione’s grateful for Harry’s weirdly quick reflexes when he catches Ginny by the elbow. It's thanks to him that she doesn't go crashing into the glass coffee table covered with cups half full of liquid in ten different shades of Kool-aid, paper napkins balled up on paper plates littered with pieces of Doritos too small to bother with, and someone’s left sneaker.

“Is that your rich fuck? The one you’re always going on about?” Ginny says. “Looks like he’s slumming it with the plebes tonight.”

Hermione feels the color rise at her neck, and turns so she can’t look at him.

“I don’t know what he’s even doing here,” she says, to no one who’s really listening. “It's a holiday weekend, isn’t he supposed to be in the Maldives, shooting sea turtles or something?”

“He’s that bad?” says Harry, but the little attention he has for Hermione’s rising irritation is swept away by Ginny’s tongue, moving against his collar bone.

He _is_ that bad, thinks Hermione.

He went to some ultra-elite, conservative boarding school in New Hampshire, his father golfs, or at least walks around holding golf clubs, with Newt Gingrich, and more importantly, he argues against every single point she makes in class, whether he believes what he's saying or not. She knows he doesn’t believe his own bullshit, not always, because once she suspected he was doing it, she purposefully contradicted herself on an earlier point she'd made about emerging democracies, and he took the opposite position without missing a beat.

Hermione doesn't hate a lot of things, but she does hate people who play devil’s advocate. She also hates shitty Merlot and the mere idea of peppermint schnapps, people who chronically show up late to class holding lattes, George Walker Bush, brown-haired girls in too-tight dresses rubbing on people at parties, charming assholes with calculated smiles, dimpled chads, boys who wear button up shirts and ties everywhere, that probably _sleep_ in them, and rich fucks whose fathers bought them a place at the Ivy League school she busted her ass earning the credentials to get into.

While she’s carefully avoiding watching Ginny paw at Harry until he decides it's time to take her back to the apartment he shares with Hermione and put her to bed, someone runs across the dance floor wearing nothing but a fan of autumn-colored crepe paper streamers glued above his ass like a flaccid turkey tail.

Festive. 

Hermione sips her Merlot, winces, and tries to stop thinking about Florida.

She can't.

She doesn’t look at the dance floor, doesn’t think of it, until the DJ’s playing Heart of Glass, and the room is spinning like the mirror ball hanging from a hook screwed into a medallion in the middle of the ceiling.

Ginny’s curled up in Harry’s lap on the blue velvet sofa behind the crowded coffee table, crying about how much she loves him, and Hermione decides it’s time to dance.

She doesn’t have much rhythm, but the wine takes care of that, and before she can overthink it, she’s shaking out her hair at the edge of the dance floor and throwing her ass back.

She never drinks like this.

She never dances like this.

What Hermione does do, better than anyone, is study.

But tonight, she's different.

Everything feels different, and she marvels at how it's nothing like she thought it would be: she, and the world, tripping across the starting line into a new millennium.

The reflected spotlights pinging off the surfaces of the mirror ball fill the floor with countless reeling red and green and gold coins of light, and Hermione reels, too. She wonders when she’s going to gain her sea legs on the rolling skin of this ocean that is the floor, because as much fun as it is to stand here and wind her hips in a figure eight to the pull of the bass, she’s starting to think she needs her hand on a guard rail before she falls in and drowns.

She closes her eyes, and tilts her head back, and the world tilts, too.

Back, back, back…

Until there is a blessed pressure at her hips, an anchor, holding her still at sea.

She opens her eyes.

He’s there, the blonde asshole.

He smells like sweat and cologne and another girl’s perfume, which inexplicably makes her angry and think about sex at the same time.

“Hi, rich fuck,” she says, and smiles lazily at his smug, rich fuck face.

He’s suddenly not so smug.

“Nice, Granger,” he says. “Glad to know my help is appreciated.”

Hermione laughs, short and sharp and completely devoid of joy.

“Your help?” she says. “Is that what you call it when you take up a position you don’t actually hold just to be an argumentative prick, Malfoy?”

“No, but it’s what I call it when I’m literally holding you up so you don’t fall on your ass.”

She looks down, and realizes she’s leaning, hard, into both of the hands he has around her waist.

“Fair enough,” she concedes. “Why are you even here? Shouldn’t you be off at your little secret club- what do you call yourselves? Slitherers? Slither-ins? Like little snakes?" She makes a tiny hiss and a wiggling reptilian gesture in the air with her hand. "Is it a thinly veiled penis metaphor?”

He smiles at that, and something about that smile makes her feel that despite the iron grip holding her up, she’s slipping.

He leans in, close to her ear.

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore,” he says, so quietly she can barely hear him.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” she asks, changing the subject before swerving her hips to the music again.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” he says. “Are you talking about the girl that was trying to dance with me?”

“Yeah. She looked like a good prospect. Why aren't you still with her?"

"She was boring,” he says, and of course he was bored. What wouldn’t be boring if you always got everything you ever wanted?

“I’m not boring,” she says, without knowing why, and closes her eyes.

“No. You’re not.”

She opens her eyes again, and tries her best to resolve her focus on his.

They’re clear and grey, and looking back at her with an expression that she can’t read.

“You’re wearing a tie at an off-campus house party, Malfoy,” she says.

It’s dark blue, over a white shirt that’s tucked into fitted, midnight blue slacks. The top button of his shirt is, admittedly, undone, and the tie is pulled loose.

It feels smooth and cool between her fingers.

“Appearances matter to me,” he says.

The room is still shifting, and she needs to hold onto something solid. She slides her hands up the tie and over the collar of his shirt to loop around the back of his neck.

His fingers flex against the small of her back.

"Appearances are for rich fucks," she says. She knows it doesn't make any sense. They’re not even her own words, and she doesn’t swear, either, almost as a rule. But when she’s in the same room with him, she fills to the brim with vinegar, and thinks about bending the entirety of her powerful intellect toward inventing new ways to tell him to fuck off.

“That sounds more like your South Boston Irish Catholic friend over there than you,” he says, looking toward Ginny on the couch. Hermione feels her cheeks flush hot with embarrassment.

He looks down between them. Hermione’s wearing a navy blue, high-necked minidress with long sleeves and a waist tie pulled into a bow.

“Do you want to tell me that you don’t care about appearances?" he says.

Her shame is tempered with pleasure at what he’s implying about how she looks, and she hates that she’s so easy to please. That _he_ pleases her, in any way.

"And your parents are, what, dentists? In Marin County?” he continues. “I’ll bet,” he says, leaning into her ear, “they’re specialists.” She narrows her eyes, and he pulls back from the edge of a smile. “Not quite straight out of the trailer park yourself, are you?”

“How do you know that?” she asks, and it’s both an admission and a deflection, but she doesn’t remember mentioning any of those things in class.

“I asked around.”

She wants to tell him off, but while she didn’t need to hear about the grandfather in the Senate directly from him, she knows a bit more about him than that. She once did a search for the name Malfoy in the library’s digital New York Times collection.

She also asked one or two girls who might know something about his reputation.

It was informative.

“Why do you have to be so argumentative?” she demands.

His haircut, short at the back, looks like it would feel good between her fingers, so she runs her hands up into it, and it does feel good.

It feels fantastic.

His fingers grip her waist even harder.

There are too many bodies on the dance floor, and even though she can feel the sweat building up in her underarms, she pushes into him.

She makes _space_ for him.

“Why,” she repeats, “do you argue about _everything_?”

His right hand slides up the ridges of her ribs, then lifts, and then she can feel his fingers woven into and softly gripping at the roots of her hair, which is standing out in unmuted volume from all sides of her head.

“You know lions?” he says.

“What?” she practically yells. “How are lions relevant?”

He smiles, and she rolls her hips against him irritably.

“The best thing about them,” he says, and she wonders if it’s his fingers drawing her in closer, or if it’s happening all on its own, “is the roar."

His mouth is so close she can taste the top shelf Scotch on his breath. She stares at his lips, at the sharply defined arch of his cupid’s bow. If she put out her tongue, without moving any other part of herself, she could lick it.

The music shakes her spine, and she's waiting.

Waiting.

He tilts his head to the side, just slightly, and when she parts her lips, he whispers into the paper thin sliver of space left between their mouths.

“I don’t kiss girls who are so drunk they can’t stand up without help.”

She doesn't understand what he's talking about. She hasn't invited him, hasn't tried to...and then she realizes that it's _her_.

 _She's_ the one who's leaning.

It's _her_ legs that have opened to make room for his thigh.

 _Her_ chest pressed against his ribs.

But it's him smiling. 

“I wasn't trying to...” she starts. Her belly buzzes with anger and humiliation, and she pulls her face away from his.

“I don’t kiss self-satisfied neoconservative pricks," she spits.

His smile breaks open even wider, and she’s about to tell him exactly what she thinks about that, when there’s a hand at her elbow.

“I’ve got her now, thanks,” says a clipped and entirely sober voice. It's Harry, forever coming to everyone’s rescue.

She watches Malfoy look Harry up and down, figuring him out.

“You want to add another drunk girl to your collection?” he asks Harry, looking past him to where Ginny sits, slumped over on the sofa. “I’m perfectly capable of getting her home safely.”

“She’s my roommate, and I’m taking her home,” says Harry. His eyes are nothing but cool, confident murder when he wants them to be, and Hermione knows that behind the unassuming glasses, he’s scrappy and calculating and has a brutal right hook.

“Alright,” says Malfoy finally, and Hermione feels her weight transfer from one set of strong hands to another.

She hates that she immediately misses Malfoy's heat.

“I’ll see you in class, Granger,” he says as she's walking away, and she looks back over her shoulder. He’s standing still and alone on the dance floor, lips curled up in a crooked smile.

Ginny’s right. He’s a rich fuck.

And something else, that she doesn’t think she’ll ever get a chance to understand.

Even if she wanted to.

Which she doesn’t.

As she leans into Harry’s side on the way to his car, sharing the column of his waist with Ginny’s pale, freckled arms, she yawns, wide and loud.

Like a roar.

**Saturday, December 9th, 2000**

“Maybe the liberal justices get Kennedy, maybe they don’t, but ultimately, it’s going to be closely decided, and half of the country is going to be unhappy about it,” says the snowman.

Hermione watches him sip from a bottle of beer with the label peeled off, carefully avoiding the plastic carrot strapped over his nose. He sighs appreciatively, and adjusts the white felt framing his face.

“You look young, are you still in college?” he asks, raising his voice over the throbbing ambient electronic music being pumped through the space by a DJ with a ginger four day beard.

Hermione’s fixated on the middle of the three massive felt coal buttons running down the center of his snowman body, which has started to peel away from the rest of the costume.

“Yeah, I’m a Junior. I turned 21 in September,” she says, as though someone is going to check her I.D.

“Nice,” says the snowman. “You want a drink?”

“No, thank you, I’m not drinking tonight,” she says. “I have finals this week.”

“I don’t miss that,” says the snowman. “Shit. Well, I’ve gotta pee, and this thing is a bitch to take off.”

Hermione shifts her knees to the left to make room for him while he gets up off the couch, and in less than a minute he’s replaced by a pregnant woman dressed as Madonna.

Luna floats on angel wings between a pair of sexy Mrs. Clauses, and grabs Hermione by both hands.

“Come and look at the art,” she says, and Hermione doesn’t know how to say no.

She lets Luna guide her through the press of bodies, her blonde hair and silver tinsel halo glowing under strings of vintage Christmas lights running the length of the exposed roof.

“This is one of my favorites,” Luna says, stopping in front of a large photographic print hung on an expanse of exposed brick wall.

It’s a black and white image of a nude woman with skin as pale as paper and a mass of dark wavy hair, lying on the ground. Her body is painted from her toes to the tips of her fingers in what looks like the same thick mud she’s lying in.

Her eyes are covered by two bloody steaks.

“That’s...something,” says Hermione.

“It is, isn’t it?” says Luna. “It’s called _Mud/Blood_. It’s 1972, during the period that Bellatrix was exploring the dialectic between flesh and earth. Between the living body and decay.”

“Lovely.”

“This was the same period that she performed and photographed her _Death Eater_ cycle- that's the very famous one with the raw meat- and just after, she developed and performed _Crucio_ ,” says Luna.

Hermione looks at her blankly.

“That was the piece where she allowed crowds to connect clamps anywhere they wanted to on her nude form and apply electrical shocks that they controlled with modified Atari joysticks,” she says.

Luna turns back to the print for a long moment.

“I’m hungry,” she says, finally. “I hear there’s pudding.”

Hermione allows Luna to thread her arm through her elbow and guide them both over to the kitchen, which is all lower cabinets constructed in a vast U. The counters are loaded with plates of hors d’oeuvres and kitschy 50s dishes, Jell-o molds and things made with SPAM and pimento-stuffed olives.

“Oh, Christmas meat,” says Luna, scooping cranberry-sauced meatballs from an olive-green Crock Pot onto a red paper plate.

Hermione yawns.

She’s out far later than she intended to be so close to finals, and she’s not sure how she got roped into accompanying Luna to a Christmas costume party at a major contemporary artist’s loft in the first place. Luna's really more Harry’s friend than Hermione’s, but she’s odd in such a disarming way that Hermione finds it very difficult to say no to her.

“Your friend is bored, Luna.”

A woman wearing middle age extraordinarily well slides up to Luna, puts kisses on both of her cheeks, and tilts her head to the side.

“Are we boring you?” she asks Hermione.

She recognizes the woman from the print she’d looked at earlier, not much changed in thirty years, except for the fact that she’s not presently nude.

“I’m having a nice time, thank you,” says Hermione.

“Hermione, this is Bellatrix Lestrange,” says Luna. “Bellatrix, this is my friend Hermione.”

Bellatrix looks Hermione up and down.

“I’m sure you’re very nice, Hermione,” says Bellatrix. Hermione can’t place her accent. She sounds like either an American who spent decades in Great Britain, or a Brit who spent decades in America. She’s wearing a corseted dress made of white strips of fabric, and she's wrapped artfully around with chains, like a Dickensian ghost. “Luna, darling,” she continues, “have you met my nephew?"

Luna shakes her glowing head in the negative.

"Draco!” Bellatrix shouts into the packed room. “Where the hell are you?”

Hermione freezes.

Her first instinct is to make a break for the other half of the apartment, but before she can, Malfoy strides into view next to his aunt, who lifts onto her toes to plant a rapid kiss on his cheek.

He’s wearing black trousers with a black vest and tie and a grey shirt, and his sole concession to a costume is a small pair of curved horns tucked discreetly into his hair.

Judging by the way he’s leaning as though his foundation is sinking on one side, he’s had a few more Scotches than he’d had at the last party.

“Draco, my love, this is Luna Lovegood. I met her in the bulk goods aisle at Whole Foods last month,” says Bellatrix. “She’s an actual genius. She does…”

Bellatrix looks expectantly at Luna.

“I’m currently assisting with faculty research in computational complexity theory,” says Luna.

“You see? I know how much you like the smart ones,” Bellatrix says to Malfoy. 

Malfoy looks at Luna, who pops a meatball into her mouth using a toothpick, and smiles at him with angelic beatitude.

He gives her a gentlemanlike nod, and then he shifts his eyes to the right, and sees Hermione.

“Fuck,” he says.

Before anyone can respond, he turns on his heel, and disappears back into the crowd.

“What an infant,” says Bellatrix. “Luna,” she says, moving on, “I would love nothing more than to carry you around in my pocket and introduce you to absolutely everyone I know.”

Hemione doesn't hear Luna’s response, because she’s already storming across the room after Malfoy, pushing through sweaty bodies until she sees him, leaning up against a wall close to the DJ booth.

“Go away, Granger, I’m too drunk to fight with you,” he says.

“Why ‘fuck’?” Hermione demands, jamming a finger into the middle of his chest.

Malfoy presses his palm over the place she touched him, and raises an eyebrow.

“Well, when two people love each other very, very much...”

His voice is what it always is, all affluence and self-confidence, but tonight there’s a lazy, disheveled edge to it, frayed in the places where it’s usually precise and polished.

He’s drunk, clearly.

“You know what I mean,” says Hermione.

“Do I?” he drawls.

“What the hell was that? You can’t just play nice at one party?”

He blinks slowly.

“I can play very nice, at any party,” he says.

“Then why did you embarrass me like that in front of your aunt? She already thought I was boring, now she thinks her nephew hates me.”

“I’m not sure what difference it makes to you what my aunt thinks about you. You don’t even care what _I_ think about you.”

“I already know what you think about me.”

He leans his head back, and looks at her from beneath half-closed eyes.

“Do you?” he asks.

“Obviously, you can’t stand me," she says. "But there's no excuse to be that rude. You'd think with all that money you'd be able to afford some manners.”

She thinks he's going to give into temptation and fight with her, but instead, he reaches out a single finger, and slides it over the gold fabric covering her hip.

“This is too much,” he says, quietly.

Hermione bristles.

“My dress?"she says, incredulous. "I don’t really care what you think about what I’m wearing.” She’s in a vintage 70s knee length gold lamé dress with spaghetti straps that she bought two weeks before. It’s fitted and extremely low cut, and gathered at the front of the bodice in a way that makes the folds spread out from a central point like rays. “Am I supposed to cover up or something? It’s a costume party, for Heaven's sake, I can show as much skin as I want.”

He drops his hand.

"Of course you can,” he says.

“Of course I can!”

“You look," he says, listing to the left, "like a star."

“I’m the sun. For the solstice,” she says.

“I can tell, he says, then reaches up to touch her cheek, just under the gold glitter star decal Luna insisted on gluing below the outer corner of her left eye. "You got a gold star.”

Suddenly the snowman is at her hip, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

“You wanna dance with me?” he asks, then notices Malfoy. “Sorry, man, I'm cutting in.”

Hermione shrugs out from under his arm, and quickly turns away from him, so that her back is to Malfoy.

“I’m alright,” she says.

Malfoy wraps his arms around her waist from behind, and pulls her into him. “She’s alright.”

The snowman looks her up and down, looks at Malfoy, and shrugs.

“Whatever,” he says, and goes lumping away with his middle button flapping loose.

Hermione should shift out of Malfoy’s grip, but she doesn’t.

She doesn’t move in the slightest, and he drops his forehead to her shoulder.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi, says Hermione.

He turns his head.

“I’m the big spoon,” he says, muffled against her neck.

“You’re the incredibly drunk spoon,” she says.

“I know.”

Hermione turns herself around inside the loop of his arms.

“What are you supposed to be, anyway?” she asks, touching one of his little black horns.

“I’m Krampus,” he says. “It’s a German Christmas...devil...thing.”

He wraps both of his arms further around her waist, pulling her chest into his ribs, then leans down into the soft skin behind her ear, and breathes in, slowly.

“Why do you smell like cinnamon?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Why do you hate me so much?” she asks back, tilting her head to the side.

“I have never, ever, _ever_ said that,” he says.

She can feel one of his hands sliding over her ribs, and down to her hip.

“You don’t have to say it,” she says. “You’re always goading me.”

“I am,” he says. He runs his closed lips lightly up the skin of her throat, and brings them to rest against the lobe of her ear.

“Because you like it,” he whispers.

“How would you know what I like?” she asks.

She can feel his smile.

“I think you’ll tell me,” he says, and she shivers.

His fingers drift slowly downward, slipping over the start of the curve of her backside.

She turns her head, bringing her mouth against his ear.

“So smooth, Malfoy,” she says. “I’ll bet this works all the time.”

His hands still.

She nudges at his cheek with hers, and he pulls away to look into her face.

“I don’t…” he begins.

“I’ve heard how good you are,” she says, and watches his eyebrows rise. “At getting girls to like you,” she continues, pressing her hips into the top of his thigh, “and you can give it up. Because I don’t like you.”

“No?” he says, softly.

“No.”

“Not even a little bit?” he asks.

“Not at all. And you don’t like me.”

He lifts a hand, wraps one of her curls loosely around his fingertip, and half of his mouth pulls up in a smile.

“No,” he says, “I don’t like you _at all_.”

“You don’t,” she confirms.

“Because you’re the most stubborn fucking person I’ve ever met in my entire life,” he says, leaning his forehead against hers.

“Mmm hmm.”

“And you’re bossy,” he continues, swiping his nose against her cheek.

She nods.

“And you know fucking _everything_ there is to know,” he adds, dragging his lips across her cheekbone.

She silently agrees.

“Especially about other people,” he finishes, bringing his lips to within a hair’s breadth of her mouth.

“Do you want to know something else about me, Malfoy?” she asks.

“Everything,” he says, tugging at her curl.

“I don’t kiss boys who are too drunk to remember it,” she says, whispering across his lips.

“What?” he asks.

As she pulls away, his mouth chases hers, and his hand clutches firmly at her backside.

"I'm not that girl, Malfoy," she says.

He pulls back, and stares.

“You’re not serious,” he says.

“As serious as you were at the Thanksgiving party,” she answers.

“You were plastered,” he says. “I _couldn't_.”

She’s almost sorry to reach back and pull his fingers away from her, but she’s not going to be one of Draco Malfoy’s nameless drunken hookups.

“And now you're so drunk, you think you like me,” she says, twisting out of his grip.

Before he can say anything more, Luna loops around on Bellatrix’s arm.

“Luna, can we head home?” says Hermione.

“Of course,” says Luna, smiling placidly.

Luna leads the way to the door, and she hears his voice, once, over an abstract electronic melody that might be Jingle Bells.

“Hermione,” he says.

She doesn’t look back.

**Friday, December 22nd, 2000**

“Nader didn’t lose Gore the election. Gore lost it himself,” says the compact, light-skinned brunette standing in front of Hermione in the crowded hallway. “People are fucking done with Clinton. Gore’s more of the same neoliberal, triangulated centrist bullshit, it’s just greenwashed. If the Democratic Party doesn’t respond to the progressive wing, you’re going to see this over and over again.”

His name is Irish, either Sean, or Seamus, Hermione can’t hear very well over the ear-splitting scuzz of the punk band playing downstairs and isn’t sure she caught it right.

He’s a comp sci major at another school, a Green Party voter, and a New Atheist, and he doesn’t want to hear anything Hermione has to say.

“He won the popular vote,” says Hermione, and she sounds strident even to herself.

Seamus rolls his eyes, and takes a massive gulp from his red Solo cup. His hair is shaggy, his jeans are faded, and he smells like warm lager and the kind of deodorant that has the word “woods" in the name of the scent. She's surprised he got past the doorman.

Hermione thinks about the little beaded bag she has slung across her body, standing out against her prim periwinkle blue dress, and what’s inside: her wallet and car keys, a bottle of eucalyptus-scented hand lotion, a vial of pepper spray, a tube of sheer lipstick, and a strip of three condoms.

She’s open to the idea of getting laid tonight.

It sounds crude. And maybe it is, but she’s 21 years old, and the world feels like it’s ending, and she’ll be damned if she waits another six months for another nice boy to come along and disappoint her.

She’s been with a few guys, of course.

There was Cormac McLaggen in high school, then in the first week of college, she had met and fallen in love with, but not _in love_ with, Harry. Harry had already met Ron, so Hermione had met Ron, and she and Ron fell, without meaning to, into a relationship that took them a year and a half to acknowledge wasn’t doing anything for anyone.

There had also been the summer that she and Neville Longbottom had desperately tried to convince themselves that they worked as well sexually as they did volunteering at an organic gardening cooperative for at-risk teenagers.

They didn't.

She looks at Sean-Seamus, with his ultra-progressive certainties and the way that her opinions don’t even register enough for him to contradict them, and decides that there must be better options.

This party is something Susan knew about, and Susan, with all of her connections, got them into. It’s in a massive white Colonial at the very edge of campus, but technically, conveniently off it, and while Hermione knows it’s not a fraternity, she’s not sure who actually lives here. The upstairs common rooms are filled wall to wall with people talking over the music rising from downstairs. At the end of a long hallway on the second floor, there’s a room with a vast sectional sofa and an enormous flat-screen television where a handful of boys are playing Goldeneye 007 on an N64, while girls with bare midriffs watch them and drink Technicolor cocktails from red plastic cups.

Downstairs is unbridled chaos, and it takes her half an hour to find Susan. She’s sitting at the edge of an island the size of a continent in the middle of a kitchen with a professional range and a refrigerator bigger than Hermione’s bedroom closet, and swinging her self-tanner brown legs to the beat of a song that will knock the top few Hertz off of Hermione’s hearing range in middle age.

“Her-my-nee,” slurs Susan, and she hops down from the counter and envelops Hermione in a deep embrace. “Are you having a good time?”

Hermione isn’t, but that seems irrelevant, as Susan clearly is.

“Have you had a drink?” asks Susan, and then she remembers about the driving plan, and runs her palm down her face at her own faux pas.

“Shit. Come dance,” she says, changing tack, and pulls Hermione into the large front room.

It’s completely stripped of furniture, and a pair of grinding guitars blast in punishing waves from a stack of amplifiers on either side of a makeshift stage, where a four-piece punk band is holding court. The hardwood floors vibrate with the shock of dozens of people jumping up and down, and the smell is what Hermione imagines the inside of a Super Bowl locker room must be like.

Hermione isn’t sure how a person dances to punk rock, beyond jumping, and as soon as Susan lets go of her hand and hops off, swinging her long, light brown hair around her head, Hermione lets herself fade back against a wall and watch.

In the middle of a song that’s about either shit, shade, or a shed, there’s a sudden blast of cold air, and Hermione hears a loud series of crashes in the kitchen.

There’s a cluster of young men on the far side of the island, and a pair of them is lifting an industrial sized stock pot onto the counter top, knocking off a slew of half-empty beer bottles in the process.

“Fuck, what happened to the cones?” says a rangey man with short, curly black hair and soft-looking, luminous brown skin. He’s opening and shutting cabinet doors, looking for something.

“You bought them, Blaise, what the fuck did you do with them?” says a man wearing black, military-style glasses. He’s shorter than Blaise, light-skinned, with dark hair, and wears a Black Flag t-shirt.

“Found them! I put them in the drawer with all the paper shit,” says Blaise, rising from a crouch and tossing a long tube of paper cones at the dark-haired man. “Are you scooping these, Theo?” he asks him.

“No, it’s my fucking birthday party. I’m not scooping anything,” says Theo. “Where’s Pansy? Did she leave with that botanist? Shit. Draco? Are you down?”

Hermione freezes.

Over the top of a cluster of girls talking animatedly with their hands near the island, Hermione sees a pair of lean shoulders, and the back of a white-blonde head.

Shit, shit, _shit_.

She presses herself fully into the wall, and considers how to pull Susan from the dance floor, find her coat, and get the hell out of this party before he knows she’s there.

“No fucking way. You guys knock yourselves out,” he says.

“Fuck you, I'm too drunk,” says Blaise. “Fuck. Where are the bottle things? I think I put them on a shelf in the garage. If I have to scoop this shit, go get the fucking spouts.”

Hermione watches Draco’s head loll from behind, and she suspects he’s rolled his eyes, dramatically.

“Fine, but I’m done after that. I don’t want to have anything to do with this, it's fucking gross,” he says. “Go find Daphne, she loves this kind of shit.”

Then he rounds the island, and walks straight for her.

He’s wearing another button up, light blue, sleeves rolled, only this time the top two buttons are undone, as well as the bottom one, and it isn’t tucked into his dark trousers.

He looks wrinkled, but intentionally, like he wore the shirt to bed on purpose because he likes the way it looks when he gets up, and Hermione immediately pushes that thought far away.

His hair is a species of bedhead, too, arcing in a wave over his forehead that never crashes, and she wonders how many times he’s run his hand through it tonight.

She grips her bag, and looks out on the dance floor, trying to find Susan in the chaotic dark, and hopes he’ll walk right by without noticing her.

The silhouette of Susan’s hair makes occasional appearances over the top of the crowd, but otherwise Hermione doesn’t see her.

She doesn’t see Malfoy either, and when she looks up to find out what’s become of him, he’s no longer in sight.

“Fucking Malfoy, what the fuck?” shouts Blaise, looking away from Hermione toward the back half of the house. “You're going the wrong way. I need those spouts, asshole.” Blaise looks in Hermione's direction, then, and she watches his face change.

It begins with irritation and quickly moves to confusion, then on to scrutiny, and is followed by what looks like recognition, then surprise, and finally mirth.

He’s looking right at her.

“Holy shit, Malfoy,” he says, and then he walks directly toward her.

She thinks that he’s coming to speak to her, but when he approaches, he says nothing. He simply walks by her, and opens a door she discovers that she’s been standing next to, and goes through it.

It opens out to a garage, and Blaise is back within seconds, holding a dozen bottle spouts in a small plastic bag.

But then, he leans against the wall next to Hermione.

He’s tall, probably an inch over Malfoy, who’s a full head over Hermione, and his voice is a sweet baritone. He’s very drunk.

“Can I get you a snow cone?” he asks.

Hermione raises an eyebrow.

Blaise smiles, and Hermione thinks about her strip of condoms, and the fact that he seems like the sort of person who would make it very easy, and very pleasant, to fall into bed together at a party.

But no, she didn't want Sean-Seamus, and she doesn't want this boy, either. He’s beautiful, and she can’t do better, exactly, but she thinks there’s something different for her, even if she doesn’t know what it is.

“We’re making grown-up snow cones,” he says. “Out of snow. Come on.”

He slings one long arm around her shoulders, and Hermione permits him to guide her into the kitchen. He feels like the sort of person you know immediately, that everyone feels like they know immediately, and Hermione wonders if he plans to go into politics.

He tosses the bag of bottle spouts onto the counter, and a woman with tan skin and long blonde hair grabs them and starts pushing them into the tops of a row of clear bottles filled with crayon-colored liquid.

Blaise deposits Hermione, like a stray child he’s just collected, on an empty bar stool at the end of the island, and moves to the stock pot, which Hermione can now see is full of clean, white snow. He uses an ice cream scoop to pack the paper cones with rounded hills of it, then hands them to the blonde woman, who pours the bright liquids over the top, jams a straw down into each cone, and starts handing them out.

“Is it safe to eat snow?” asks Hermione, who is thinking about the sorts of ground and air pollutants that you can see, and also the ones that you can’t.

“I looked it up, Scout’s honor,” says Blaise, lifting his hand in the three-finger Boy Scout salute, “and you can safely eat it in moderation, providing it’s been collected from a clean spot, which we did, mostly by leaving this pot outside.”

A girl on Hermione’s right side hands her one of the cones.

The smell of ethanol comes off of it in waves.

“There’s a lot of alcohol in this,” she says.

“There’s a shit ton of alcohol in it,” says Blaise, and he gives her that life-altering smile again.

“I’m not drinking tonight,” says Hermione, and she passes the cone along to her left.

“That’s too bad,” says Blaise. “Driving? You’re welcome to stay here. We have plenty of beds.”

There’s something wicked in his look that she’s not sure is a come on.

“Thanks, but I’m alright. I have a friend with me who will need a ride home.”

“Friends are always welcome, too,” says Blaise, and this time he actually winks, but he obviously knows it’s not getting him anywhere with her.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Hermione,” she says. “I’m here with Susan Bones, I think her uncle knows the parents of someone who lives here.”

“Bones, yes! Definitely, we know that family,” says Blaise. “So, Hermione, do you know anyone else here?”

Hermione looks away from him nervously, because she's terrible at lying.

“I...I'm not sure.”

Blaise looks at her thoughtfully.

“Have you ever met Draco Malfoy?”

Hermione stiffens.

“I’ve had a few classes with him,” she says.

“I thought your name sounded familiar,” says Blaise.

“He’s spoken about me?” asks Hermione, shooting her gaze sharply back to Blaise.

“A bit,” says Blaise, and the woman with the blonde hair stifles a laugh.

“It’s alright, I realize he doesn’t like me," says Hermione. "I think my opinions irritate him."

“Oh, you definitely get him going,” says the blonde woman under her breath, handing off an orange, blue and pink snow cone.

“You’re not fond of him, I take it?” asks Blaise.

Hermione pulls at the hem of her skirt.

“I didn’t say that, exactly,” she says.

“No?” says Blaise, looking at her carefully. "How would you say you feel about him? _Exactly?_ "

Hermione feels her skin turn warm, and she looks away, but can still feel Blaise's eyes on her.

“Blaise, can you hand me that bottle, please?” asks the blonde woman, pointing at a bottle full of Windex-blue liquid just out of her reach.

Blaise moves to hand it to her, but as she goes to grip it, it falls to the counter with enough force that the spout pops free of the opening, and a river of thick, sticky, deep blue liquid flows over the counter.

Before Hermione can get up from the stool, it pours over the counter’s edge, down the skirt of her dress and over her bare legs.

“Oh, shit!” says Blaise, grabbing a dish towel and throwing it across the spreading blue pool.

Hermione stands up, but the damage has been done.

Her periwinkle dress is now soaked through to the skin. Both the dress and her legs are stained bright blue, and she can feel a trickle of liquid sliding down into one of her shoes.

“Damn, I'm so sorry,” says Blaise, coming around the island with a towel and then mopping at her ineffectually.

“It’s alright,” says Hermione. “I’ll just find Susan and we’ll go.”

“No!” says Blaise, insistently, “No, no, no. Don’t leave, please. We’ll get you something. Daphne, can you get her something to wear?”

The blonde woman shrugs and nods.

“Don’t go,” says Blaise, again. “I'd like you to stay.”

He mops at her for another moment, then says, “Up the stairs, down the hallway to your right, last door on your right. No one should be in there, and there’s a bathroom. Get cleaned up, and Daphne will bring you something to wear. But don’t go, it’s still really early.”

Carried away on the force of his conviction, Hermione winds up the stairs, and finds her way to the end of the only quiet hallway in the house.

She knocks, and when no one answers, she opens the door.

The room is enormous, and very dark, and Hermione finds her way over to a bedside table, where she clicks on a lamp.

There’s a black iron bed, neatly made up with pale grey bedlinens, and an ottoman at the foot of the bed covered in Black Watch tartan to coordinate with subtle pops of green in what is clearly a thoughtfully decorated space. Underneath the window there is a tidy desk with a lamp, a pair of chairs facing a fireplace, and along the long wall with the door is a row of floor to ceiling bookshelves, completely filled with books.

She supposes this is Blaise's room.

Hermione puts her purse down on the bed, and finds the bathroom in the back corner. She strips off her shoes and dress, and runs the dress under cold water to remove as much of the blue stain as she can, then wets a washcloth and rubs at her skin.

The blue isn’t going anywhere, but she’s able to remove the sticky feel and the smell of alcohol, and she hangs her dress over a towel bar to dry.

She’s waiting for Daphne to come by with something to wear, and she lets the lure of the bookshelves draw her out of the bathroom.

There’s Kant and Isabel Allende, Tolstoy and Woolf, John Kennedy Toole, Haruki Murakami and Clarice Lispector, a copy of _The Guns of August_ and the Taylor Branch histories of the Civil Rights movement. Whoever belongs to these shelves is a wide-ranging reader, or at least an eclectic book collector, which is how Hermione finds herself standing in a stranger’s bedroom wearing nothing but a bra and underwear, her warm brown skin dyed blue, reading a copy of _Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass_ , when the door bursts theatrically open.

“What the _fuck_ , Blaise!” shouts Malfoy back over his shoulder. “This is my favorite fucking shirt!”

Hermione can hear loud peals of laughter from downstairs.

He’s unbuttoning his shirt, which now has a vivid candy apple red stain spreading in a wide strip down the front.

He doesn’t notice her standing by the bookshelves as he plows into the room, and in her shock Hermione can’t move or speak as he strips off his shirt, steps into a walk-in closet, and emerges without it.

He goes into the bathroom, and Hermione hears the water running and the sound of him scrubbing at his skin with a washcloth.

It isn’t until the water is shut off and a too-long silence sets in that Hermione remembers her own wrung out washcloth is draped over the towel bar alongside her wet dress.

She’s standing perfectly still and holding her breath when he steps out from the doorway to the bathroom.

He doesn’t startle when he sees her, clutching an open book across her chest, because, she thinks, it’s what he expects to see.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he says.

“Blaise told me to come up here to get cleaned up,” she says quickly. “I had no idea it was your room. If I did, I would have just gone home.”

He blinks, slowly.

“Blaise told you,” he repeats. He tilts his head back, and looking up at the ceiling, slides a hand down his face. “Fuck.”

After a moment, he walks back into the closet, and emerges with a fresh shirt in his hand. Then he starts toward the door.

“Wait,” Hermione practically shouts. She’s closer to the door than he is, and by the time his hand is wrapped around the door handle, she’s left the book lying on a shelf, and her body is pressed up against the door, blocking his way.

Malfoy closes his eyes and breathes out heavily.

“What?” he asks.

“Please stop running away from me," she says. “I don’t...I don’t dislike you.”

He opens his eyes again, and looks at her intently.

“You don’t dislike me,” he says. “What, exactly, does that mean.”

She feels a rising awareness of how much skin is available between the two of them. She’s in nothing but a pink cotton bra trimmed in white eyelet and a pair of matching underpants, and despite the blue stain at the front, she’s profoundly grateful that she thought through her underwear tonight.

Because she thought someone might see her in them.

And now someone has.

He’s still not wearing a shirt, and his skin looks cool, taut over lean muscle. She has an overwhelming urge to reach out and run her fingers down his abdomen.

She wonders if he’d mind.

“I’m not entirely sure why _you_ don’t like _me,_ ” she begins, “other than differences in opinion…”

“Hermione,” says Malfoy.

“...and I realize that we’re from very different backgrounds, but...” her eyes dart to his bookshelves, “...I think I’ve made a lot of assumptions about you based on your family and your socioeconomic status that...well, they might not be true.”

“Hermione?”

“I pride myself on learning as much as I can about a topic, and I may not have all the information I needed to form an opinion of you based in fact, versus conjecture, and, if I’m being honest, prejudice, and, looking back, I have some doubts about the way that I’ve interpreted your approach to dialectics...”

“Hermione,” he says, and his voice finally cuts through.

“What?” she asks, looking up at him.

He wraps a hand around her hip, and uses the leverage to pull his body almost flush with hers. He’s near and warm, and she fights back the impulse to simply close the entirety of the space between them. 

“If you’ve been drinking,” he says, quietly, “I’m going to have to ask you to let me through this door, before I make some terrible choices.”

Her brow wrinkles.

“I haven’t been drinking at all,” she says. “I’m supposed to drive Susan home, and honestly I don’t really drink, normally, that party was just after the election, and I was…”

She stops and searches his face.

“Have _you_ been drinking?” she asks.

“No. I have a flight in a few hours. And a liver.”

“Oh,” she says.

One of them has moved closer to the other, because there’s no distance left to cross when Hermione lifts a hand and rests it on his bare arm, just above the elbow.

His fingers trace a light, lazy pattern over her hip.

“You don’t dislike me,” he says. His eyes travel an unhurried course from her eyes to her mouth, and back again. She wants to ask him what he finds there, because whatever it is makes his breath pick up.

She looks down to where her bare feet stand, folded over one another, on the cool of his hardwood floor.

“No, I don’t,” she whispers, before looking back up at him. “Not even a little bit.”

He hasn't once looked down at her body, but his eyes are pure fire.

“Hermione,” he says, matching the quiet of her voice, “If we're both sober, I’d actually like to lock the door.” He leans in to bring his mouth close to her ear. “Is that alright?”

She nods, and hears the soft click of the thumb latch.

“Hermione,” he whispers. “I’d like to kiss you.”

And she turns her mouth to his.

She’s imagined kissing him before, of course.

Of course she has.

She’s not disappointed.

His mouth is warm and gentle and moves against hers in patient exploration, testing the feel of her bottom lip between his, and then the top, until she opens up to his tongue, and lets him in.

“Can I touch you?” he asks, his fingertips hovering over her breast.

“Please,” she answers, and as he grasps one breast over her bra, thumb stroking firmly at her nipple, his kisses lose their control and softness, and he moans against her mouth.

She smooths her fingers across his chest and down his belly, and when she trails her fingertips tentatively under the waistband of his pants, he breathes out heavily and nods.

“Yes,” he says.

She works his button free, and then his zip, and reaches in to fold her hand around the hard outline of his cock over the fabric of his boxer shorts.

His long, low groan is punctuated by the hard press of his hips against her hand. 

“Can I take off your bra?” he asks, lips barely parting from her mouth and finding it again in a rush. She nods her clear assent, and she can feel his fingers stuttering against the skin at her back, then she’s bare to him, and her bra is dangling from one of his crowded shelves.

“You’re so fucking beautiful, Hermione,” he breathes, and his eyes are glazed, but he’s looking at her face and hair like he’s trying to cut a permanent groove in the record of his memory.

She pushes her chest up toward him, and he drops his head to taste her skin, pulling at her hardened nipples with his lips and tongue and drawing out soft moans from Hermione’s abandoned mouth.

“I want you to fuck me. Please,” she breathes. She’s never been shy, but for some reason asking for this from him so openly makes her feel brazen. It’s both thrilling and humiliating: empowering, and like she’s on her knees, begging.

The impact of her question on him is immediate, and she can feel him pulse in her hand as any traces of uncertainty vanish from his movements.

He pulls away to look at her face, then slides both hands down to grip at the eyelet trimmed edge of her underwear on either side of her hips.

"You want me to fuck you?” he asks.

“Yes,” she answers, nodding, and he drops to his knees, yanking her underwear down her legs as he goes.

He uses his mouth on her while her shoulders are still pressed against the door, her leg slung over his shoulder, until she comes with a throaty shout that makes him reach down and grab the base of his cock firmly in his fist.

“I want you,” she says while her legs are still shivering.

He stands, threads his fingers through hers, and guides her to sit at the edge of his neatly made bed.

She reaches for his cock as he’s pulling his pants and boxers over his ankles, and guides it to her mouth.

He lets her, for a moment, slide her lips over his length, and looks down on her while she tests the feel of him on her tongue.

She speeds up, just a little, and swirls her tongue around him.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” he groans, pulling his hips back. “That’s enough.”

She savors him as he leaves her mouth, and makes a noise in protest.

“Unfair,” she says, leaning forward to give the tip of his cock a tiny lick.

“Fuck,” he answers.

His eyes can’t seem to focus, and she smiles.

“I need a condom,” he says. “ _Now_.”

His body is pressed over hers, his hand is at her breast, his tongue is licking fiercely into her mouth, and with every involuntary thrust of his hips, his tip hits the slick wet seam of her cunt.

She breaks away, grabs her beaded bag from the end of the bed, and with a proud flourish, pulls out a strip of three condoms and a container of pepper spray.

He looks at her blankly, then breaks into a kind of laughter she’s never considered him capable of.

“Can we keep the condoms, and put the pepper spray back?” he asks.

“Are these okay?” she asks, handing him all three.

“They’re good,” he says, tearing one open and rolling it over his length with shaking fingers.

He pauses, and looks at her, sitting on her knees with her hands folded in her lap, prim and naked on the end of his bed. 

“Fuck,” he says, for the hundredth time tonight. “Come here.”

His fingers slide over her clit while he rocks into her.

“Do you like this?” he asks, searching her face for the answer, and she knows he’s asking because he cares, and also because he’s running out of breath, and his rhythm is starting to falter.

She’s wetter than she thinks she’s ever been, and the pull of him, in and then out, from above, while her legs are wrapped around his waist, is somehow bigger and better and simply _more_ in every sense than she’s ever felt before.

“It’s so good,” she says, breathlessly, and her hips arch against him, using the pull of her heels against his back to match his pace.

“Does this mean you like me?” he asks, and while his lopsided smile makes light of the question, his eyes, behind the sweat-soaked curtain of his hair, don’t.

“I like you, Draco,” she says. “I like you so, _so_ much.”

His face tells her what she can’t ask until it’s all over: that she doesn’t have to be a one-time guest in his bed.

That he’d maybe be more than a little broken if she was.

She can feel her body tightening down around him, and his fingers move firm and fast against her, begging her to let herself go.

“I want to watch you come,” he says. “Please, Hermione. Please come.”

She gives him what he wants, and he watches her fall, devastated affection written across the open book of his face, before tumbling after her.

Daphne leaves the extra clothes outside Draco’s bedroom door, and makes sure that Susan makes it home safely.

**Saturday, December 23rd, 2000**

They lie in his bed, and argue.

They argue about Friedman and Keynes, social democracy, immigration policy, and solutions to climate change.

They argue about mint chocolate ice cream, the best Beatles album, and the ending of _2001: A Space Odyssey_.

She realizes, halfway through the day, that when she’s defending a point she believes in, when she feels her cheeks are glowing pink with conviction, his eyes light up.

That it’s when he likes her the most.

“I voted Libertarian,” he finally admits, and they argue about that, too.

They argue, and then they fuck.

At 8 p.m., eating take out chow mein in his bed over a towel, watching _Die Hard_ on the flat screen TV mounted to the wall across from his bed, she looks over at him.

“You said you had a flight,” she says.

He swallows, stabs his chopsticks into the box, and looks at her furtively.

“I can get another one.”

**Sunday, December 24th, 2000**

The phone next to his bed rings for the sixth time in the last hour, and Draco finally hits the speaker button to answer it.

“Hello?” he says, half asleep. 

“Draco, what the fuck. I’m in Palm Springs, it’s like, fucking 3 a.m. here, and your dad just called me from Fiji. He said you weren’t answering your phone. He’s pretty pissed. I hope Christmas at fucking Slytherin House by yourself is better than drinking on the beach, asshole.”

“I’m not alone, Blaise.”

“Oh, shit. Sorry. Hi, Hermione.”

“Hi, Blaise,” says Hermione.

“Thanks for putting our boy out of his misery,” says Blaise.

“What,” says Hermione, “do you mean by that?”

“Damn, he hasn’t told you? He’s been pining after you for like two y-”

“Bye, Blaise, Merry Christmas,” says Draco, slamming his finger down on the speaker button to end the call.

Hermione sits up on one elbow, looks down at Draco, and raises an eyebrow.

“What?” he asks. “I thought it was obvious.”

She drops back down to lie with her head against his chest, and wraps her arm around his waist.

“It wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“We managed to figure it out. Fiji?” she asks.

“It’s overrated,” he says, pushing her hair out of his eyes.

“My folks are in Australia this year, but how do you feel about spending Christmas with the large, Irish Catholic family of my ex, and my platonic boyfriend?”

“Your what?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to the idea.”

He sighs, and it’s with the kind of contentment she knows survives most things, even platonic boyfriends.

Even elections.

“That,” he says, “actually sounds pretty fucking perfect.”


End file.
